


What We Are

by TinTurtle



Category: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (TV)
Genre: Fic, Friendship, Love, Older Characters, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-02
Updated: 2021-03-02
Packaged: 2021-03-14 08:47:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,374
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29789385
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TinTurtle/pseuds/TinTurtle
Summary: Two turning points in Napoleon and Illya's relationship.
Relationships: Illya Kuryakin & Napoleon Solo, Illya Kuryakin/Napoleon Solo
Comments: 10
Kudos: 34





	What We Are

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to sparky955 for beta reading this fic.

**2010**

"...and this is my partner, Illya."

The pretty young thing behind the desk smiles, and I can hear what she is thinking as plainly as if she spoke it aloud: 'Oh, how sweet.'

Well, perhaps we are.

**1976**

We had both been out of the field for several years. Illya had settled permanently in the lab, and I was in a Section I strategy position under Mr. Waverly's successor, Marvin James. Illya and I saw each other little during the work day, but we were together two to three evenings per week in our off hours. We visited restaurants we both enjoyed, occasionally saw a performance together, but more often than not it was an evening at one of our apartments with takeout. We played chess, drank, and talked about everything and nothing.

I was still dating, mind you, with as much enthusiasm as ever, but I always found time for Illya. He found time for me, too. Unfailingly. I never invited him out or over only to be told that he had plans. I knew he visited jazz clubs—he would tell me about them when we were together—but I saw no evidence that he himself was dating. My friend had never dated as much as I did, of course, and had been necessarily circumspect about most of his liaisons. (UNCLE turned a blind eye to its agents' eccentricities, but only as long as they never became an embarrassment to the Command.) Nevertheless, Illya did not have to be circumspect with me, and in the past there had been scattered references to his social life outside of my company and the jazz clubs.

Not that I thought much about his lack of dates. I'd always hoped that, once the field work was over, Illya might find someone steady. I hoped the same for myself. The office life still felt new, though, and I was in no hurry, so I supposed that he wasn't, either.

Then I met Helen, she of the educated wit, puckish smile, and gentle heart, of the sparkling eyes and the hair like polished wood in firelight. I saw her frequently, though not exclusively, for three months before the night everything changed.

That night was a night in with Illya, with deli sandwiches and beer. We had been talking and then there had been comfortable silence, and then I said, "Helen is a girl I could marry." If I hadn't been looking at Illya, I would have missed it, but an expression flashed across his face, something that was there and then gone, and I would have sworn it was pain. Then he quirked his lips and said teasingly, "The notorious Napoleon Solo caught at last?" Disconcerted, I replied, "Well, it was only a thought" (as indeed it had been). The conversation moved on. Yet there was an unaccustomed tension in Illya for the rest of the night. Hardly there, but I knew him better than anyone.

Later, after he had gone home, the moment kept returning to my mind. Pain. Was Illya envious that I might had found someone? Or perhaps it was the idea of my marrying her. After all, even if he met someone special, it was not likely to be someone he could marry. That seemed wrong, though. For all his occasional ill temper, Illya was not given to envy—not really. And it wasn't as if he was trying to find someone, in any case. He was available whenever I asked him. Whenever I asked...

It was like looking at one of those cryptic pictures and seeing a meaningless pattern suddenly resolve itself into an image. Not just pain. Loss. If I married, I would have a home life, maybe children. Illya and I would still be friends, but we would not be companions as we had been in the field and still were now. We would not spend the evenings together that we spent now. The evenings, I now realized, that he prioritized over every other activity.

I wondered almost for the first time whether Illya could be in love with me. He had flirted with me for years, certainly, but I had always discounted that as a playful nod to his inclinations, a way for him to enjoy my acceptance of them. Was there something more to it? Since there was no chance of anything between us, the question seemed somewhat academic. What would change if he were?

Once asked, however, the question stuck with me like a persistent itch. It occupied my thoughts at odd times, both alone and when I was with Illya. I think I made him quite jumpy with all my pensive looks in his direction.

After perhaps two months, I still didn't have an answer, and I decided that, in the end, I didn't need to know. Yet I had seen something else as I searched our past and present for clues to Illya's feelings. For more than ten years, it had been me Illya sought out when he was in a serious mood and me he played to when he was in a whimsical one—me he trusted with all the shifting forms of his Protean personality. No one else. Whether he loved me "that way" or not, I was the most important person in Illya's life. Not only that, but there was every chance I always would be. It took a lot to push through my partner's reserve, and in all those ten years, no one else had succeeded as I had.

And that truth led to a certainty that settled in my very bones. I could not get married, not to Helen or to anyone else. I couldn't do that to Illya. Not for anything.

I searched, but failed to find any true regret. I had been in love once as only the young can be, and my feelings for Illya were no less strong, in their way. There was nothing important a woman could offer me now that I hadn't already been given.

\---

So we kept on much as we were. At my suggestion, we formalized our evenings together, meeting consistently on Sundays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays. Illya planned some dates around that schedule, but he never seemed to see anyone, man or woman, for more than a handful of weeks. I kept on dating as well, always keeping things light, guarding my heart. That game wore thin with the years, though, and as we both entered our sixties, I was only taking a woman out a couple of times a month, and always saying good night at her door when I did.

**1998**

I decided that I didn't want to die in harness like the Old Man, and elected to take my pension at 65. Illya did as well, to my surprise, but his eyesight was declining, so perhaps work in the labs did not appeal as it once had.

Giving him a lift home after his retirement party, I voiced an idea that I had been considering for almost a year. "We should move in together, IK, now that we're both retired bachelors."

He looked at me as if I'd grown a third eye. "What?"

"Well, I have plenty of extra space in Aunt Amy's apartment, we'd both save money, and you wouldn't have to go home in the dark after we have an evening in."

Apparently I'd grown a spare nose, too. "Napoleon, this isn't 1887. You know what people will think if we live together."

I gave him my most impish grin. "Let 'em."

\---

It took a couple of months of nagging and some hints that I'd been lonely since my own retirement, but he did finally move in with me. It was an adjustment for us both, but it's been a joy, too. It's a little like being in the field again, but without the shooting and explosions or, thank God, all the running.

**2010**

"Let 'em," he said, a decade ago, and he still introduces me as his partner, though I'm sure he knows what that word means these days. Truly, I don't know what we are to each other now. But whatever it is, it's more than I ever thought to have, and it is sweet.

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was influenced by the works of ChannelD, especially ChannelD's story _Unspoken Passion_.
> 
> This is my first fanfic based on The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and my third fanfic overall. At the moment this one is a bit of a gussied up plot bunny, but it's the longest thing I've written to date. Perhaps someday I will expand it to tell less and show more.
> 
> The first Sherlock Holmes story, _A Study in Scarlet_ , was published in 1887. (I know that one of the MFU tie-in novels indicates Sherlock Holmes was a real person in the MFU universe. Depending on the details of that, the reference could still work.)


End file.
